The real-life romance between writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West takes center stage in Chanya Button’s provocative period drama Vita & Virginia. Exploring sexuality and passion, desire and connection, the film features strong performances by Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki, and a script by Eileen Atkins that effectively incorporates the two literary legends’ own words.

Vita & Virginia is a gorgeously-appointed historical drama based on the facts of the romantic affair between literary giant Virginia Woolf and fellow writer Vita Sackville-West. The drama is directed by Chanya Button, who co-wrote the screenplay with renowned British actor Eileen Atkins, who used the letters between Woolf and Sackville-West as the basis for the stage play on which the film is based. Filled with stunning 1920s costumes and wonderfully lush sets, the film’s visual beauty seems aimed to seduce us, as much as the lively, aristocratic Vita sets out seduce the aloof, intellectual Virginia Woolf.

A movie about the legendary literary lesbian romance that directly inspired the creation of one of the great works of fiction, starring the absolutely incendiary duo of Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki? It’s criminal that Vita & Virginia is this dull. This blah. This, somehow, stodgy. There’s no passion to be found here: not sexual, not intellectual. How does this happen?

Opening Nov. 13, AWFJ’s Movie of the Week is Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, the intimate biopic of the legendary siren of the silver screen by Swedish writer, director and film critic Stig Bjorkman. Read on…